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New trail proposal wins backing of Palo Alto City Council

An eleventh-hour request from Palo Alto and Stanford University for a grant that would greatly accelerate the city's ambitious bike plan and create an expansive trail network around the Stanford Dish glided past the City Council Tuesday night and now heads to the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors for approval. ==B Related stories:==

&#149; [Web Link Palo Alto and Stanford team up on new trail proposal]
&#149; [Web Link Palo Alto could get $5 million for new bike bridge]
&#149; [Web Link Palo Alto makes bid for bike-bridge funds]

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Comments (7)

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Posted by Resident
a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood
on Sep 5, 2012 at 8:24 am

Can we have some clarification please.

Are bike trails, mtb trails for serious mountain bikers? If so, these are not suitable for hiking or for road bikes.

If these are bike dedicated bike paths, will they also be something that are suitable for pedestrians to use?

I think it is very important to clarify if these are something that are going to draw mountain bikers from all over the area, or if they are something that just makes recreational biking and hiking as well as commuting, easier.

I'm glad that this project is finally getting started after 12 years of stalling.

However, I am very disappointed with the convoluted route they picked to cross I-280. The distance along this route is twice as long as it has to be, which will discourage almost all pedestrians from using it.

To answer the previous question, I'm pretty sure the trails east of I-280 are all paved and standard multi-use width (12 foot or so). West of I-280, they will probably all be narrow dirt trails.

These will likely all be paved "MUPs" (muli-use paths) like the Stevens Creek Trail. Most experienced bicyclists hate these MUPs because they can only be used at very slow speed due to the iPodestrians and inattentive side-by-side walkers. Foothill College has a short but interesting path that has a paved bikeway with a crushed gravel ped path next to it to reduce the conflicts. I wish that approach were more common.

Posted by decimal point?, a resident of the Midtown neighborhood, 12 hours ago:

The Dumbarton trail is NOT 27 miles long like this article claims. Did the author forget a decimal point or reverse the digits? 0.72 mile is far closer to the truth. This is a very short trail (a couple of blocks) between East Menlo Park and East Palo Alto.

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